Metal Slug 3

The Good
Metal Slug 3, the last game made by SNK under their former name and what a game it is. From a graphical and level standpoint it's the best game, but let's start from the beginning.

The story takes place several years after the second game. General Morden is officially listed as missing. To make sure every powerbase by Morden is destroyed, Rossi and Roving go on a mission to do just that, but they realised that the organization is too well organised and that Morden is perhaps not as dead as we think. So our heroes are on a quest to destroy Morden's army but are shocked that the Morden they face is in fact an alien and the real Morden was taken as a prisoner. Not only do our heroes have to deal with Morden's army, now they have to deal with aliens too.

The gameplay is still the same as the other two games. You choose one of the four soldiers and shoot your way through the game. Of course you have new weapons in your arsenal. For example you have an enemy chaser who follows the enemies and kills them and a laser gun which takes out enemies much faster than any other weapon you have. Also there are numerous new Slug vehicles you can ride. There is the Slug mariner who adds more firepower under water and fires torpedoes as well and an Elephant Slug. It's just an Elephant with a Vulcan cannon, but it's awesome and there are other great Slug weapons as well, which gets me pumped to try what every Slug vehicle can do.

The new and probably best feature for me is that there are branching paths in this game. In almost every level, you can take another path which leads you to another level. This makes the game highly replayable and i love games that have a feature like that. Just as a little side note, i also like the reference to the game In the Hunt, which is a game where you control a submarine, and in Metal Slug 3 if you choose the submarine in the first level, you get to see the reference.

The graphics are just as great as they always are and i love seeing buildings in the backgrounds destroyed after you defeat the boss.

The soundtrack is also one of the highlights in the game. This is probably my second favorite soundtrack of the series, only beaten by the fifth game.

The Bad
[NOTE: spoilers!] There is only one thing that i don't like. The last level of this game. Let me tell that this level for me is far too long. You start with a reference to the first game, where you take the Morden clone. Then all of a sudden your character that you played the entire game gets kidnapped and you have to play another character. Well, that's not a problem for me since there isn't any difference in those characters anyway. Then you go into space and take out UFOs on the way. Then you reach the mothership and kill more aliens and free the real Morden. Then you kill the mother alien. Then you have to flee from the mothership but zombie aliens are after you and spill blood all over the screen, which makes your escape much more difficult, not to mention there are walls you have to destroy and finally, when everything is destroyed, the mother alien tries to attack you one last time. For an arcade game that's a pretty long level but as i said, i don't like this level because it's far too long. If they just ended the level with the mother alien destroyed the first time, it would have been just fine, but no, they had to add more.

I also really hate those zombies in this game. If you get hit you turn into a zombie. You move so slow and if you are going to pick up weapons nothing changes and of course the animation when you die takes too long.

The Bottom Line
This is THE Metal Slug i am always looking forward to play. This game has everything i want from a side-scrolling action game. Great music, great weapons, funny humour and branching paths that make the game replayable to no end.

That's it folks, see you later.